British secret deal helped Israel go nuclear

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Britain secretly supplied the 20 tonnes of heavy water to Israel
nearly 50 years ago that enabled it to make nuclear weapons,
according to documents that have been discovered at the Public
Records Office in London.

Officials in the then government of prime minister Harold
Macmillan deliberately concealed the deal from the US, according to
the files, which were discovered by BBC's Newsnight program
and broadcast on Wednesday.

Historians and politicians have been startled by the discovery,
which sheds new light on the process by which Israel was able to
circumvent attempts to restrict membership of the "nuclear club" to
the great powers.

Most of those involved are now dead, but Lord Ian Gilmour, who
was active in Conservative politics during that era, said: "I would
have been astonished and found it absolutely unbelievable."

He said he did not believe Macmillan or his ministers knew
anything about the sale, which Britain permitted without demanding
safeguards against military use.

The sale, in two successive 10-tonne shipments to Israel from a
British port, went to Israel's secret underground reactor at Dimona
in the Negev desert. The primary motive for the sale, according to
the documents, appeared to be commercial.

The British atomic energy authority was able to get rid of a
consignment of heavy water worth £1.5 million, or £20
million ($46 million) in today's prices, which it had bought from
Norway but no longer had a use for.

The deal was structured as a resale to Norway, which then traded
the consignment on to Israel.

This enabled British officials to say they had no responsibility
themselves for imposing safeguards.

But, according to the documents, the deal was concealed from the
US, which was hostile to proliferation, because the Eisenhower
administration might have insisted on unacceptable conditions that
would have scuppered the sale.

When Robert McNamara became the US defence secretary in 1961, he
and then president John F. Kennedy strived to stop Israel from
going on to build nuclear weapons.

The origins of the heavy water used in the Dimona reactor
remained almost entirely unknown until the revelations of the
nuclear whistleblower Mordechai Vanunu, a disaffected Dimona
technician, in the 1980s.

It was disclosed then that the 20 tonnes of heavy water
originated from Norway. But Norway continued to remain silent about
the true nature of the deal.

Heavy water, made by a laborious electrolysis process, is so
called because it contains extra neutrons.

It was a crucial element of the kind of basic nuclear reactor
then being built by Israel with the help of France, which used
natural uranium rather than the more advanced technology involving
enriched uranium fuel.